As a former mail administrator for a very large organization, there are multiple methods of dealing with this, but all of the easiest ones involve disabling the list for a few hours, or disabling its ability to send, then parsing through queued messages and deleting anything that's a reply-to the original subject line. If it's a true list, then people are just replying to one email address that distributes the email among list members.

Sounds like either someone was literally asleep at the switch or they just didn't give a fark.

We have multiple email groups, but corporate seems to find the need to tell everyone in the whole company "news" about other locations that have nothing to do with us. Then the brown nosers need to reply all and make a comment about the email. Like if the email is saying this location had 6 months without an "incident", they would respond with "congratulations!!" and "keep up the great work!!". At least 10-15 people for the next 4 hours. Pretty annoying, and I'm new there.

That shiat happens at my job a couple of times per year. The email goes out to all immigration officers all over the damned world and then we get hundreds of reply all's "this went to the wrong person" then the helpful asses who say "quit replying all!"

Then every hour it repeats as each subsequent time zone has more workers starting.

It got to the point where it will now go on your performance review if you reply.

C18H27NO3:That wasn't nearly as cataclysmic as I was expecting hoping.

Yeah, I saw the headline and was hoping for something along the lines of a watchdog group being included in a sensitive conversation, or an incriminating document is accidentally sent to an attorney general.

This has happened before where I worked. The replies are almost the exact same (people are the same everywhere...). First the clueless people, then those that just keep it going just to annoy the clueless people... It's mildly amusing entertainment...

Had this happen at a very large state agency I used to work at, close to Christmas...it continued almost all day, went from requests for removal and general confusion to wishes of happy holidays to everyone, and had started to seriously bog down the servers by the time the IT guys threatened to start writing people up if it didn't stop. Ha! Then it almost started up again the next day thanks to people who were not at work for the original round of lunacy. Idiots.

That happened while I was in school. The school sent out an email to a group of students and alum about a speaker on campus. One person on the list replied to the list and asked to be removed from it. Before long, it was spiraling out of control with people replying.

This happened at a place I worked, with 50,000 people I didn't know. I was surprised how many people tried to force their strong will across cat 5 to make everyone stop. Some were very heated. Companies spend millions upon millions on worthless meetings trying to get everyone on the same page about something. When it happens within minutes for free including everyone from the CEO down to the lowest housekeeper with an email account, not one person thinks Hmmm, for a minute there everyone in the company was on the same page.

I know some of you might have to abc123 your way through 500+ emails a day - but do you know how powerful it is for a whole large cap to share a moment? The act of communication is sometime more important than the content.